: Baking in professional development to bridge the ​‘knowing doing’ gap Ever baked a cake which has failed to rise? Missed the essential ingredient?

Ever baked a cake which has failed to rise? Missed the essential ingredient? Possibly, like me, you have forgotten the baking powder and then wondered why it has sunk in the middle. Baking is all about chemistry; teaching is the same as baking: we need to ensure, as the EEF puts it, that we have the right ​‘active ingredients’ for the chemistry to happen in our classrooms.

Knowing how to teach is simply not enough. Teachers need to know how to put that specific strategy into action. They need to understand the active ingredients. As leaders of learning, we need to bake into our professional development the specifics of how teachers can put ideas, strategies and new learning about pedagogy into practice.

Peps McCrea has written about the ​‘knowing doing gap’ in his blog. He explains that gaps emerge because teachers haven’t done enough practice themselves outside of the classroom. Our experience at TKAT is just that. Although teachers talk knowledgeably about teaching and learning there is often this ​‘knowing doing gap’. In other words there is a gap between what they say they do and what actually happens.

This first blog, in a series, looks at how to improve teaching by focusing on metacognitive strategies. This is because, in my experience, all too often metacognition is the active ingredient that is missing yet can also help to bridge the ​‘knowing doing gap’. That, alongside three essential ingredients, in professional development, which are: modelling by experts, deliberate practice and sharing insights.

Taking on this particular challenge at Kemnal Technology College, (KTC), one of our secondary schools, Trust Lead Practitioners and KTC’s Deputy Headteacher have recently collaborated to rapidly improve explicit instruction.

Firstly, we met to do some finding out before we tried to change practice. Observing lessons, talking to teachers and students, we discovered that not only did the students think that if the Head of Maths was their teacher for everything, ​“you’d be Albert Einstein” but also that, ​“probably the best advice for every single teacher, is the quieter the lesson, the more you can put into our heads.”

The key issue that emerged was ensuring that teachers could create the culture and climate in their classrooms to support their live modelling and narration of thinking. The Deputy Headteacher led several CPD sessions on what the school decided to call ​‘Silent Focus’ to support teachers with improving their modelling and narrate their thinking more effectively.

Working with those expert teachers, like the Head of Maths, the CPD lead in the school led sessions focussed on strategies like ​‘cold calling’ and ​‘positive circulation’ too. Ensuring that there was emphasis on ​‘wait’ time to give pupils time to think has also been important in order to build participation and thinking time.

Critically, whilst the CPD included experts modelling the strategies, teachers had time to practice outside of the classroom too. Once these were embedded we could then move on to building the cake with the base sponge in place! More about bridging that gap and unlocking the learning through metacognitive strategies in the next blog.